About FIMS
Mission
Mission statement
The mission of the Fisheries Integrated Modeling System (FIMS) is to enhance the connection of models used to assess the status of managed fish stocks to ecosystem, climate, and socioeconomic factors while meeting current management needs.
Vision statement
We aim to accomplish our mission with a user-friendly stock assessment tool that streamlines the development and application of scientific advice to inform current and future management needs of NOAA Fisheries’ regions.
Priorities
- FIMS meets the needs of operational stock assessments across regions, scenarios, and data types and levels to provide scientific advice to management bodies.
- FIMS implements practical and robust methods from ecology, statistics, computer science, and mathematical modeling.
- FIMS estimates and projects population trajectories and can estimate parameters and uncertainty accurately and reliably in simulated conditions.
- Users spanning different levels of expertise can run a model within FIMS.
- FIMS welcomes and incorporates user, developer, and community contributions and feedback to shape design decisions and priorities, in accordance with open source principles, and communicates progress, key findings, and advancements back.
- FIMS is flexible enough to adapt to future management needs, new technical developments and data sources, and observational data types and supports the NOAA Open Science Initiative.
Why FIMS?
Learn more on the FAQ page.
Community
A team of experts within NOAA Fisheries is designing and developing the system, and we are advised by the FIMS Council which includes academic, industry, and international partners.
Contributions from individuals of all skill levels are welcome. The codebase and documentation heavily relies of contributions from volunteers and it is imperative that we receive both feedback and contributions from users to ensure the user experience remains true to our aim of being user friendly. The roles of internal and external collaborators are outlined in the roles section of this community playbook.
Get involved
Users and developers are welcome to join the Discussions board or submit bug reports using GitHub Issues. Please use the issues in the NOAA-FIMS github.io repository to make suggestions regarding this website and the issues under the FIMS software repository for software design and development feedback.
Current project status
The project is constantly under development 🔨. Check out our progress so far below:
| Metric | Status |
|---|---|
| Development | Status |
| Total Issues |  |
| Closed Issues |  |
| Pull Requests |  |
| Calculate test coverage |  |
R cmd check |
 |
| Google tests |  |
Comparison to other frameworks
| Feature | SS3 | FIMS | RCEATTLE | SPoRC | WHAM | Multi-WHAM |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software | ADMB | TMB and C++ | TMB/RTMB | RTMB | TMB | TMB |
| Operational ready | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Prior specification? | Yes | Yes | M, Q, and SRR | M, h, Tag Reporting, Movement, Q, selectivity | Q only | Q only |
| CAAL | Yes | No | In dev | No | Yes (deprecated) | No |
| Split sex | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | Maybe |
| Age-error | Yes | No | Yes | TV but not fleet specific | In branch | No |
| Fleet Age-error | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| TV Age-error | Yes | No | In branch | Yes | No | No |
| Variety of selectivity | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| TV selectivity | Yes | In branch | Yes (random walks, random deviates, blocks) | Yes (blocks, iid and random walks, semi-parametric 3d and 2d) | Yes | Yes |
| Growth estimation | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Marginal lengths | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| DM compositions | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Additive logistic-normal compositions | No | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| Environmental linkages | Yes | No | M, Q, SRR (any number of indices) | Q | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-area | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Population Structures | global SRR | No | No | global or local SRR | No | Natal homing, local SRR |
| Multi species | No | No | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Multi-variate indices | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| Multi-seasonal | Yes | No | No | In branch | No | Yes |
| NAA or M state-space | No | No | M | Will be in dev | NAA and M | NAA and M |
| DSEM-ready | Never | Long-term | Yes | Yes | Harder | Harder |
| Internal OSA | No | No | In dev | No | Yes | Yes |
| Internal AFSC proj scenarios | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Reference point estimation | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| MSE tools | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Release
The current release can be found on the FIMS release page. A list of all releases and their corresponding changes can be found on our changelog page.